The young, 8-year-old Andy eyed the baseball arching high in the air, down the right field line into foul territory, as it left the sandlot playing field. The wayward ball sailed 35 feet into a bordering cornfield and rested approximately 300 feet from its origination: home plate.
For most of the crowd watching the baseball game that Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1926, the ball was out of sight and out of mind. But not for Andy. The nascent baseball enthusiast was currently a temporary truant of St. Michael’s Orphanage, which housed more than 400 children on 340 acres of farmland. The orphanage bordered the borough of Hopewell, a small town of 2,000 residents and seven working farms, nestled in the valley of central New Jersey’s Sourland Mountains.
